Do you use Appimage with Appimage Launcher?

General system Applications
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AppImage files are handy when you don’t want to install the package or you want to have different versions of the package. AppImage files are in containerized format and suit me with fast changing packages like Obsidian, where I can keep older versions in case of issues with all my community plugins.

Obsidian is in AppImage format and they release new versions very often and I have a bunch of third-party community plugins that may not always play nicely with their latest release. You can install Obsidian from the AUR, but it’s maintainers are way behind Obsidian’s official site, and as this is such a mission-critical tool for me, that I can’t be dealing with bugs from outdated versions.

If you don’t mind having all your AppImage files in one folder then you can navigate to them in a file manager, but if you have a lot of them, then it would be good to have them in a menu system.

@dalto pointed out a neat companion tool which integrates AppImages into your menu system called appimagelauncher in the AUR by creating a .desktop in the menu. I use Plasma, so I don’t know about other DE’s, but I suspect they work the same.

@ricklinux started an interesting thread in 2020 which talked about AppImage Rather than revive an old thread, which talked abut audio file tagging with kid3, I thought it was time for a fresh thread.

I would be interested if there is much interest in AppImage and anyone with experience of with AppImage Installer, another package in the AUR.

Does anyone have experience with know about AppImage Installer and whether it should be used.

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I only use a handful of appimages but I like to have a high degree of control over my system and I find that appimagelauncher sometimes gets in my way.

I usually just handle my appimages manually my making a desktop file myself. If the filename changes, I use a script to launch it with a wildcard.

I have not tried appimage-installer. It appears to target deepin. I tried to take a look at it but it was hard for me since a lot of the information in the code is in Chinese and I can’t read that. :wink:

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I looked at how to do it, but the docs on Desktop Entry did not help me. How to do it manually?

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Copy another one and edit the relevant bits. There are only a few lines that are really important.

Alternatively. There are some GUI tools that will do it for you. kde/plasma has one built in if you right click on the launcher and select “Edit Applications”

Here is one of mine 
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Office
Exec=/usr/local/bin/joplin
Path=/usr/local/bin
Icon=joplin.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Joplin
Comment=An open source note taking application
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The only AppImage I use is that of LibreOffice Still.

I launch my most commonly used .odt/.ods files via a custom Rofi launcher (which works just fine in Sway) or via Ranger (which also works fine in Sway). I don’t use a .desktop file for the purpose.